L.A.’s Spanish Media Face New Latino Reality

Shortly before the Dodgers’ home opener this season, radio station KWKW-AM, the flagship of the team’s Spanish-language network, unfurled a new green-and-red banner from its broadcast booth behind home plate. Gone was the station’s longtime slogan, “La Mexicana,” quietly replaced by the numbers 1330, KWKW’s dial position.

As far as flag-raisings go, the change was hardly historic. But for Rene Cardenas, the Dodgers’ Nicaraguan-born broadcaster, the move was a long overdue recognition of Los Angeles’ changing demographics.

“The old banner got a lot of people mad,” said Cardenas, one of those who got mad. “We’re not all Mexican, you know.”

Indeed. Driven north by political violence and economic instability at home, well over half a million Central Americans have settled here in the last 15 years, making the group the fastest-growing segment of Southern California’s burgeoning Latino population and a market force to be reckoned with.

Virtually overnight, the dynamics of the Latino community shifted so far that a once-innocuous radio slogan suddenly became controversial, and long-held assumptions were called into question in every Spanish-language television newsroom and radio programming department in Los Angeles.

Even veteran Spanish-language journalists had trouble making sense of it at first.

“There’s been always a sense for Mexican people . . . that this is like home,” says Jose Ubaldo, a Mexican-born assignment editor for “Noticiero 52,” KVEA-TV Channel 52’s twice-nightly newscast. “But in the early ‘80s, things started changing. For me, at the very beginning, it was very hard to understand that change. And people who didn’t understand that change didn’t last.”

As a result, Southern California’s three Spanish-language television stations have revamped their newscasts, radio outlets have altered their programming and Lotus Communications--the same company that brought us “La Mexicana”--even purchased a new station, KVCA-AM (670), Radio Centro America, to meet the community’s changing needs and tastes.

“You have a huge Central American population that can’t be ignored. And the Central Americans won’t allow themselves to be ignored,” says Roberto Lovato, a marketing communications consultant who counts KMEX-TV Channel 34 among his clients. “There’s a growing Central American culture, a growing Central American community, and to the degree that that community sees itself reflected, it’s going to buy, it’s going to consume things. Including media services.”

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Jairo Marin’s first journalism job was with a radio station in Colombia, where local news rarely had anything to do with events outside Colombia. But as the news director at KMEX, the flagship station of the national Univision network, Marin has quickly learned that demonstrations in Managua or inflation in San Salvador can be bigger stories in Los Angeles than most things that happen at City Hall.

That’s why KMEX was the only Los Angeles station--English or Spanish--to send reporters with President Clinton on his spring tour of Latin America, dispatching anchor Jesus Javier to Mexico and reporter Rosa Maria Villalpando to Costa Rica. And that’s why on Saturday morning the station will air an emotion-laden one-hour special on the deportation crisis facing tens of thousands of Central Americans in the wake of changes in federal immigration law. The show, “Hora Cero,” is the latest in a series of KMEX programs to address the issue, which is significant because Mexican immigrants are unaffected by the new regulations.

“The news is a lot different now. It’s better,” says Juan Arevalos of Northridge, an apartment maintenance man from Nicaragua. “When I came here 10 years ago, I hardly heard any news about Central America.”

The increased focus on the region is partly a response to suggestions from viewers like Arevalos as well as interaction with longtime activists such as Lovato. And though some of the changes have been subtle--such as changing the name of the daily news feature “News From Mexico” to “News From Latin America”--they haven’t gone unnoticed.

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“We are selected to provide a service to this community. And we have to first of all know the community that we are serving,” Marin says. “Every single day we have to check what is going on with the community in order to be relevant and to provide information that people are needing.

“Otherwise we’re just simply wasting our time and their time.”

Still, he adds, a 30-minute newscast doesn’t allow nearly enough time to cover the breadth of issues the region’s diverse community now demands.

“Different groups have different agendas. And they would like those agendas to be addressed in the news,” says Marin, whose 6 p.m. newscast has been the most-watched evening news in Los Angeles--in any language--for more than three years.

KMEX, whose very call letters suggest its Mexican heritage, has been down that road before. In 1989, employees of the station lodged a formal protest claiming that Miami-based Univision was giving special treatment to Cubans and not serving its Mexican and Mexican American audience. The station’s growing interest in Central America, however, has provoked mostly positive responses, even from ethnic Mexicans.

“I think that it’s right,” says Maria de Lourdes Carrera, a native of Mexico City now living in La Puente. “We Mexicans have to accept that now there are people here from other countries and they want to hear about what’s happening in their homelands.”

Like KMEX, KWHY-TV Channel 22, a feisty independent, regularly supplements its fledgling newscast with Central American news, sometimes using direct feeds from two stations in San Salvador. In addition, talks are underway to add Central American soccer as well as a regular half-hour travelogue devoted exclusively to Central America.

“One of the motivations that we had was to put a Central American slant on some of our programming,” says station manager Martin J. Dugan. “We felt there was a need going unfulfilled there and chose to fill that need.”

Still, the vast majority of KWHY’s programming is targeted at Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who account for about 80% of the region’s Hispanic population. And the station logo is the Aztec calendar, a symbol of great cultural importance in Mexico.

But since severing its ties with the then-Mexican-owned Galavision network three years ago, the station has clearly broadened its appeal. Because the station is not affiliated with a national network, it airs more than twice as much locally produced programming as its two Spanish-language rivals combined, and that flexibility has allowed it to react quickly to the area’s changing tastes.

“As an independent TV station, we have kind of strategically chosen to pick and choose our spots to compete,” Dugan says. “And part of that drove us to . . . target this rapidly growing Central American community.”

Six months after its launch, KWHY’s newscast ranks a solid second in viewer surveys behind KMEX for late-night Spanish-language news.

KVEA-TV Channel 52, Southern California’s other Spanish-language outlet, is still struggling to put its financial house in order after its parent company filed for bankruptcy protection three years ago. As a result, the flagship station of the national Telemundo network, KVEA, finds itself without the financial resources to take on free-spending KMEX and with network responsibilities that, unlike KWHY, prevent it from tailoring much of its programming to local needs. But despite those handicaps, the affiliate has produced some noteworthy programming.

Last year, for instance, KVEA sent a reporter to El Salvador to do a story about the presence of Los Angeles-based gangs there, and the station also runs a weekly news feature titled “El Salvador Primera Plana” from correspondent William Melendez in Central America. In addition, the locally produced Sunday discussion show “Contrapunto” has become a forum to address the current deportation crisis as well as other topics of concern to the Central American community.

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In the newsroom at KVEA’s Glendale studios, a slogan painted in Spanish circles the room near the ceiling. “If you deal with Central America,” it reads in part, “tune in to Channel 52.”

“This is not something new for us,” says station manager Eddie Dominguez. “But now we’re doing a lot more of it.”

And that expansion will continue; two weeks ago, as part of a major overhaul of KVEA’s news coverage, Salvador Duran, a Salvadoran-born assignment editor, was assigned to cover Central American issues full time.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been mistakes, however. Like the night former news anchor Ana Maria Canseco segued into the sports report by using a Mexican slang word for excitement. As she quickly learned, the same word has a more carnal meaning in Central America.

“There’s a litany of errors that have been made because of a lack of understanding of the difference across dialects,” says Lovato, the marketing consultant. “The growth of the Central American market has implications for Spanish-speaking media most definitely. Because we’re so numerous now.”